Program Structure

Indicative Tutorial Schedule

The central events in TechLauncher are “tutorials”. Prior to attending your tutorial, please make sure your engineering logbooks, or individual journals, are up-to-date in your repository. Tutorials are meetings that must be attended by teams with an agenda circulated well in advance, and exited with actions informed by discussions with Shadows and program facilitators. We encourage teams to adopt the now legendary Bourbaki meeting “rule”, specifically, to remain silent is not allowed; Whether you agree to all retire at 50 years of age (cf. Dieudonné), that is another matter. Guided by your collective mission, and the values of respect, fairness, honesty and cooperation, move forward collaboratively and productively and speak up!

Students and facilitators meet during most teaching weeks, as follows.

Notes: Bold indicates Audit Weeks. SELS: Student Evaluation of Learning Support; The Make-up Audit will be used to review any teams not meeting expectations and at risk of failing

Lecture/Workshop Slot

We do not have regular lectures. Scheduled lectures are indicated on the overall program schedule.

Irrespective of whether you are a student, or friend of the program, if you would like to facilitate a session, please let us know. Check with your convener, and note that enrolled students may receive bonus marks for facilitating good sessions.

Tutorials Pattern: Plan-Act-Reflect

The pattern of program activities is planned to follow an Action Learning Cycle. Groups go through a process of Planning, Acting, Collecting Feedback on Actions, and Reflecting. In the early stages of a project, teams are encouraged to plan and execute discovery/research activities.

Fig 1: Action Learning Cycle (image adapted from The University of Sheffield)

Tutorial Structure

Tutorial sign-ups will be available shortly after Team Formation. Each team has a nominated spokesperson who shall submit preferences via a circulated google sheet. Indicative slots are recorded at the ANU timetable website. Attendance at all tutorials is expected by all team members.

• Four teams and two tutors will attend each tutorial session
• Each tutorial goes for 90 minutes
• There are two general types of tutorials - Facilitated Meetings and Audits.
• Conveners may attend tutorials to discuss common issues with the entire tutorial group

The following tutorial structure is suggested:

For audit tutorials, a serial structure is recommended, where all attendees are focused on 1 team at a time. Students are expected to have scheduled the meeting carefully, and notified their client of when they should attend. Students are expected to invite their clients to the audit tutorials.

Planning and Feedback Tutorials

Teams are responsible for the running of tutorials. We suggest team members take it in turns to provide an executive project status report, and also suggest you schedule a ‘daily stand-up’ session at tutorial meetings. During ‘stand-up’ sessions, we encourage team members to appeal to their journals/engineering-logbooks when summarising what they have achieved in the preceding week. Each team should assign a meeting chair and record keeper. Teams should prepare an agenda or action item list in their repository and share this ahead of the tutor meeting.

Each team holds a ~45-min meeting with their tutor. In the alternate 45min, individuals ‘shadow’ another team, and provide valuable input, critique and a different perspective to the other teams. All attendees should have access to all team material (i.e. repositories). Teams should include their ‘shadows’ in this meeting as much as possible to ensure that they understand the team’s progress.

• Planning tutorials are focused on the socialisation of work, effort estimation and work assignment, plans, schedules and repositories.

• Feedback tutorials are focused on the collective analysis and evaluation of feedback that has been received, especially that given during audits.

Audit Tutorials

• Audit Tutorials are focussed on the independent review of your team’s work

Tutors(/Conveners) are responsible for the running of Audit Tutorials. All teams should attend tutorials prepared, and shadows should be doing 1hr preparation each week reviewing the repository of the team they are shadowing.

The default structure, is that each team has 25 minutes to inform the class—including tutors, conveners and clients—on the progress of their project. Teams are free to decide on how this time is used. However, it is strongly recommended that teams provide a 5-minute project update (with slides or handouts), and the rest of time is given to navigating project repositories and questions. Excellent teams will anticipate the types of questions they might be asked, and have ready access to their repository and supporting data. Be prepared to give a tour of all and any project materials that are relevant to recent efforts.